The work of preserving the building, and putting it in a condition of safety for the future, has had a curious interest from the fact that in its progress Karnak has been to some extent rebuilt, and by exactly the same methods by means of which it was built in the beginning. For there can be little doubt, in spite of all talk about the wonderful mechanical knowledge of the ancient Egyptians, and their possession of secrets which have been lost to our time, that Karnak, like all the great Egyptian buildings, was built, not by means of any of these remarkable secrets which never existed save in the imagination of those who have talked about them, but by the disciplined and ordered use of the very simplest means known to man, the inclined plane, the lever, and any amount of obedient human muscle. These were the mechanical secrets which M. Legrain found most useful and most economical in the end of the nineteenth century A.D., as those who had gone before him had done in the nineteenth, the fifteenth, the fourth century B.C. Senusert, Thothmes, Hatshepsut, Sety, Ramses, Sheshanq, Taharqa, Ptolemy, they all built Karnak by sheer force of human labour, disciplined and guided by a race of builders who for thousands of years had specialised in the training of men for such tasks, and with no more marvellous secrets to aid them than those oldest of man’s mechanical triumphs, the ramp and the lever. M. Legrain has repeated their miracles with the same equipment; and in an age of machinery has shown that the human machine may still be the most adequate, the most adaptable, and the most economical. Thus, then, we have seen, at two of the most interesting sites in Egypt, something of the work which has been going on with the double object of extending our knowledge of the past and of preserving its treasures for the future. Realising something of the importance of such buildings as Der el-Bahri and Karnak, and their scores of companions throughout the land, buildings which are, in effect, ancient Egypt to us, one can feel that work such as that which has been meagrely described in these pages, unspectacular though it may be compared with the work of Pharaoh-hunting, is yet of great and enduring importance, the indispensable fabric on which the glittering embroidery of the treasure-troves from the Valley of the Kings and elsewhere is wrought, and without whose rich and durable substance to form a background the golden glory of the royal tombs would lose half its meaning and beauty. CHAPTER VI BURIED ROYALTIES